


Ready to Get Dirty

by dancinbutterfly



Series: Justified [5]
Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - DEA, Alternate Universe - Law Enforcement, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternative Universe - FBI, Conspiracy, DEA Agent Vasquez, Ethel and the Marias, Evil Corporations, FBI Agent Emma, Gen, Phone Calls & Telephones, Vet Tech Matthew, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-06
Updated: 2017-06-06
Packaged: 2018-11-09 21:11:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11112963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancinbutterfly/pseuds/dancinbutterfly
Summary: DEA Agent Vasquez is supposed to be on vacation but there's a case brewing in the next district over he's invested in that's going to call him back to work.





	Ready to Get Dirty

**Author's Note:**

> Finally Vas and Emma. I've been dying to get them in here yall. I really have. Sorry for the delay.
> 
> Always for Babou <3

 

**Rachel Brooks:** [to Errol] I'm ready to get dirty. Are you?  
-Justified 3.04 _The Devil You Know_

* * *

 

“Who’s your favorite person the whole federal government?”

Javier Vasquez blinks blearily in the sunlight peaking through his blinds. He is pretty sure he put his phone on vibrate. Positive.

He had a taken a full week of leave, hadn’t he? Yeah, he was pretty sure. He was still in Dallas but the whole week had been spent practically living at The Joule, helping his family manage the chaos of Maria’s wedding, culminating in the reception last night. His big sister had looked radiant in her long dress in the cathedral yesterday afternoon, and then ecstatic in the white slip she’d worn at the party that had gone into the early morning, with laughing and dancing and alcohol. So much alcohol: tequila, mezcal and champagne her rich Arizona real estate mogul now-wife Ethel had imported from from the actual Champagne region France poured from the generous open bar. And oh god, that fucking cake…yeah. He’d barely stumbled to the elevator in one piece.

He definitely still had two more days of leave. He pulls one of the hotel’s fluffy pillows over his head and moans into his phone. He’s going to need it.

“Hang on,” he stalls. He rubs at his forehead trying to dispel the headache and works valiantly to drag his mind from sleepy civilian mode to that of DEA agent who knows how to interact with other fellow law enforcement like a goddamn professional.

It’s not working ensconced in five-star sheets in the most comfortable bed he’s slept on in maybe 5 years. Yawning, he pushes up on an elbow and looks down at his phone.

He hadn’t even been awake when he’d answered the damn thing. He glances down at the display over the touchpad. **Emma Cullen** **Company: The Furiously Bossy Irritants  
e.cullen@fbi.gov**

Ah. Right. Special Agent Emma Cullen. They’re friends, FBI and DEA crossing paths so often with the Mexican presence here in Texas have thrown them into dozens of cases together and after the third one he’d fallen into a tight friendship with her and her vet tech husband. He’d forgotten Do Not Disturb still let in calls from people on his favorite’s list. Thats why it must have rung through.

“If entire the Sinaloa cartel just turned themselves in or Afghanistan and Mexico have jointly decided to stop growing poppies, then it’s you. But you know those are the only reasons that it’s acceptable for my agency to reach out to me when I’m on vacation, let alone the Bureau. Unless you and Matthew are looking to grab dinner, of course, hermanita.” He smiles into his pillow. “I can always eat. I’m ready for scrambled eggs and maybe banana pancakes with chocolate chip. Something for this hangover. Mama is an amazing cook and mi teas, the things they can do with a tomato, fuck, but a man can’t live on tortillas alone, si?””

Emma sighs, but it’s not her indulgent one. That’s her “why am I surrounded by fucking idiots who refuse to listen to me” sigh that she only ever pulled out at work. It worked a charm on him every time.

“Que es?

“Would you want news on the Movers, even if it’s not concrete?” She asks.

Vasquez feels like all the alcohol he had last night is pushing up his throat to gag him. He glances around for a trashcan because if she’s serious, he may not make it to the bathroom to puke. “Emma?”

“Like I said, there's nothing concrete but an AUSA is asking questions regarding potentially pursuing a federal case, Javi. The specifics aren’t in division but the questions they were asking about some shell companies and any interaction forensic accounting might have had with them. My friend Leni over there recognized a one of our Blackstone subsidiaries is the list, the one Harp was supposedly CEO of.”

The Movers is a case that the DEA hasn’t really focused on. It’s not one of the major cartels or organized crime rings that the FBI encountered so far. Vasquez would never even have even tripped into them at all if it weren’t for the fact that he’d pulled a night shift when Customs at the Port of New York called the Manhattan office about a series of shipping containers coming in from South East Asia, with various kinds of contraband, including drugs.

When he and his small team got there, there had been twenty-five kilos of China white behind a store of mutilated elephant and rhinoceros faces and dead great cats, and three, fucking _three_ , shipping containers full of young women. It had all shipped together came on a barge originally from China. The girls were registered on the cargo inventory as “baby dolls” from a company based in the U.S. When USCBP had tried to contact them, hadn’t existed. Vasquez’s team had tracked them down for the drug ties but while the mailing address was in California, the owners of the company had been a pair of painfully common Anglo names listed as based in a particularly rural district of China with a phone number that wasn’t connected and an email listed that got bounced by mailer daemon.

Vasquez found records of the companies though - taxes filed, debts paid, accounts used. It was more than a decade old. There just wasn’t any substance to them, any physical space, just an imaginary filing to wash money to keep things moving.

That was why he called them the Movers. Yes it’s a shitty name. He knows that, but he can’t come up with anything else as apt for these assholes. They’re a machine that keeps in motion the flow of people, drugs, and who knew what else, but seemed unconnected anyone or any group the USCBP, the DEA or the FBI had on record.

That disconnect was spooky. Criminals came from places, a network that didn’t spring from a void. This one seemed to have defied that standard and come from nowhere and that crawled under his skin.

He’d even reached out to Interpol, because of the China connection. That had him working with some kid with an impossible last name who liked to be called Teddy Q. He was nice enough but it was hard for Vasquez to respect a guy who worked in a law enforcement agency, had the chance to go by Q and threw it away.

Through Teddy Q, he’d met Agent Gao and Emma had been at the FBI office in Shanghai at the time. The four of them fell into the question of the Movers together over the last few years in the background of their real careers. Vasquez transferred to Dallas, Emma LA, Teddy got promoted and Agent Gao went to Hong Kong(which still confused Vasquez in terms of jurisdiction). Still, they kept their eyes and ears open and whenever they could, continued to follow the trail of money up and up and up. Every time they’ve felt like they might have found someone - in China or America or Korea or Kenya or the Philipines- they’ve vanished like smoke in a hard wind.

This most recent time has been the worst. A year ago, right before she transferred back to the US, Emma had managed to get a face to one of the shells, a guy named Harp who worked in Shenzhen. Between Vasquez’s DEA connections and USCBP cooperation, they were able to catch him when he came into Miami.

He hadn’t been carrying more than a dimebag of fairly good hash so the guys in USCBP agreed to let Harp back into the US without incident so that he could walk right into Vasquez’s custody. Getting someone home went a long way to earn their favor and flipping Harp was almost too easy. Just the application of kind words and big smiles over the promise of protection and enough warning to make it clear this was no game and the wormy little man had caved like a mine collapse. Harp had been an excellent resource after that.

Harp was in charge of a shell company that owned the shell company that owned the shell company that had moved those girls in windowless metal boxes. As many levels of separation as that was, he’d said there were people higher up than him and that he’d look, he would, but that this had been going on for decades and he only knew so much.

The stream of information came in trickles after Harp was turned but it did come regularly. Then two weeks ago Harp disappeared on his way home from his office in Miami and turned up dead in a landfill in Ft. Lauderdale and the latest (and last) of his leads were gone.

“Emma,” he breathes, “Dija me. What did we miss?”

“I don’t know. But I’ve put in an official request to the DOJ about the severity of the potential Mover threat and as soon as we get approval, we’re going.”

“You say that like my boss is going to let me go to Florida. I’ve got three open cases, tigresa.”

“How about you just trust me to get it done?” She asks and ah, well, yes. He can do that. He imagines that one day she will be the Director of the FBI and then the head of the DOJ and then perhaps president. He is looking forward to it.

“Call me when we have a time table. I’m going back to sleep.”

“Lazy motherf-“

“Adios, Emma.” He slaps the screen with all his fingers until it beeps off. He pulls the covers over his head and smiles through his headache. He’s going to get somewhere on this, Goddamnit. After all this time, he is going to get some answers from the ghosts masquerading was monsters. Every bit one step closer to telling him about the function of the Movers and a way to stop them cold.

~*~*~

**Author's Note:**

> Notes:
> 
>   * I am not a fan of the War on Drugs. At goddamn all. If you want to talk about the racist, classist conspiracy that is the war on drugs? Come talk to me. I have so many thoughts. Argh. Watch the doc The House We Live In to get started. It should be required viewing for all human beings but Americans with no interaction with drugs and addiction especially. That said, illegal drug trafficking (mostly because of the practices it involves lbr) and when the Drug Enforcement Agency busts people way up the ladder, they are doing a good thing. A better thing would be fore the DEA to actually ENFORCE things like ethical drug policies that were based in regulations, harm reduction, safety, prevention and education rather than punishment and seizure. But you know, that would be sensible and we can't have sensible drug policies in America. Heavens no. *eyeroll*
>   * When I did my police ride along? Narcotics was the branch I went with for their warrant serving. Again, if you want to talk about that - come talk to me on tumblr. However, that is a big part of why I made Vasquez DEA. Of all the branches of law enforcement, drugs is the one I've go the most on-the-ground experience with both seeing how busts are done, how offenders are treated, and then in the aftermath from jail, prison, addiction effects such as illness, poverty, homelessness, etc. so I feel like I can write that confidently. 
>   * I went with DEA over ATF and FBI and Interpol because the US cares more about drugs than like...anything else? IDK why. Apparently consenting adults altering their minds and potentially hurting themselves? More important than violent crime. Also, in Texas, as a Mexican American, he's going to get farther in his career and as an advocate for the "Little Guy" in the DEA than he's likely too in ATF or FBI.
>   * I wanted to make him Interpol but did yall know they're based in D.C.? And they can't make arrests? And that the notices they issue aren't treated as seriously as warrants in the US by the State Department? Yeah fuck that shit. I need him to be able to do that.
>   * I do need an FBI agent though and no one seems better for the job than Emma Cullen. 
>   * Why's everyone doing something different?(with the exception of Sam, Goody and Horn) Well, what on TV seem to be super contentious "task forces" are, in my experience and from what I've seen and heard, the life blood of things like this. In social services we call them interdisciplinary and they allow for things like growth and development in fields where skills intersect. Everything I've seen from my research shows that law enforcement agencies do them too. It's a "two heads are better than one" situation and I believe in them.
>   * ETHEL AND THE MARIAS! SHOUT OUT TO HAZEL_ATHENA!
>   * [The Joule](http://www.thejouledallas.com/) in Dallas looks SICK omg. I want to go.
>   * Rachel Brooks is the best fucking Marshal on Justified. She is not the star but she is the best and everyone on the show knows it.
>   * I'm going on vacation til the 22nd! I may write a lot on long drives and flights, I may write nothing. I have no idea but I wanted yall to have a heads up :D
> 



End file.
